OK I have a small office and I was going to test Vistas new Network Mapping feature (Not Network Neighborhood see the Vista example at http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/alex/70882_smallnetmap.jpg
The Network and Sharing Center can use LLDP (Logical Link discovery protocol) to render a pictoral representationof your network complete with all PC's, switches, routers, and modems on a network. Pretty cool! However - I havent been able to get it to work yet.
I ran the LLTD responder (see first hyperlink below) on my XPSP2 pc and rebooted there does not appear to be a way to verify it is installed correctly. Nothing shows under the local area connection properties to prove its installed.
Per Instructions from web posts I changed the default NIC settings to allow Netbios over TCPIP instead of DHCP.
I also went in and created and applied a GPO that allows LLTD.(see 3rd hyperlink below, this link has some good GPO screenshots)
Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder (KB922120) required for XP Clientshttp://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4F01A31D-EE46-481E-BA11-37F485FA34EA&displaylang=en
Network Map Does Not Display Computers Running Windows XP http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/409fb2fa-8eb8-45af-b063-4f50f5a77b291033.mspx?mfr=true
How to Enable the Windows Vista Network Maphttp://blogs.msdn.com/wndp/archive/2006/11/03/enable_5F00_vista_5F00_network_5F00_map.aspx Vista GPO (Can only be seen on Vista Client running GPMC.msc) Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> Link-Layer Topology Discovery.
There doesn't seem to be too much info posted on the web for making Vista's LLDP work in a domain environment, I'm also trying to figure out how an admin would distribute the LLDP Responder to XP Clients - it is an ActiveX control off a web page and the not an .exe or .msi download, therefore I don't know how to distribute it via GPO? Any help would be appreciated .Mark Mills mark.mills@desktop-assistance.com

June 19th, 2007 4:53pm

I think I finally found the problem after posting this on 4 forums. Per http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=693277&page=2 several people had the same issue I did "Windows cannot create a network map for the selected type of network connection when they had installed NVidia ethernet driver (v65.55). Both of my Vista Machines are AMD 64 X2 PC's and the Asus motherboards are using NVidia Chipsets. I need to get back to some real work so I'm going to guess that my issue lies in having the NVidia driver installed. I looked at the NIC properties and the "Rollback Driver" button is grayed out so there appears to be no easy way to try a different driver right now. Case closed - for now!